Our philosophy is to support other regions and truly become a global company, says Richard McClellan, Director of Advancis Software & Services.
Advancis is 31 years old this year, so we had our 30th anniversary last year. We are on a big growth path as a company.
Advancis is headquartered in Langen, in Frankfurt, Germany, but soon we will have 11 offices globally.
We’ve really expanded out within Europe and now opening in the USA a couple of years ago, we’ve got an office in Abu Dhabi in the Middle East.
Advancis Oceania has just opened in Australia as well, so we have really expanded our footprint.
The first one would be our 30th anniversary, we had a real celebration over in Germany. All the subsidiaries flew in with all the staff and we had a summer party which involved work in terms of talking a bit about the journey of the company and the future road map as well as where it’s going.
We also did a number of workshops where previously, a lot of the Advancis’ subsidiaries had been quite siloed.
In terms of operating in the raw market with all the differences, we’re bringing everything together from our growth plan into one united Advancis.
Our philosophy is to support other regions and truly become a global company.
So we did a number of workshops that were all about sharing knowledge, experiences and helping each other in particularly emerging markets. Our aim is to excel and succeed in a quicker manner, that probably was the biggest highlight.
The next would be the new version of our primary platform, which is WinGuard X5. This had been eight years in the making.
The back end of the platform has been redeveloped into microservices.
So it’s cloud ready and we really put a huge investment into that because that’s where we felt the platform needed to be, being a 30-year-old platform.
Some of it was on old technology and old core, so it needed redeveloping, despite it being a huge investment in terms of financial and time implications.
We successfully launched that into the market, with it being developed around a Central API now. It means the product is now truly an open platform.
The last highlight was the announcement of a strategic partnership with Keene Site Capital.
We were a private equity firm who are based out of Europe and specialise in software partnerships with software companies.
Going back to our 30-year anniversary, we launched something called our Global Services programme.
Global Services is a non for profit part of Advancis, that is all about supporting other subsidiaries in particularly emerging and new ones.
The aim is to support them, so they are able to grow and scale.
We give them all the tools they need. That involves initial training, sales support and marketing engineering support as well.
It provides them with the tools to succeed and we work with subsidiaries to take their feedback on board.
People do things different. It’s not done in a uniform way.
And people also make mistakes. So again it was all about sharing that knowledge and creating this Global Services team that have got the experience and the knowledge to be able to support those subsidiaries so that they don’t continue to make the mistakes made in the past and support them globally.
In addition to that, in terms of internal processes, we also launched our new internal CRM, which we’ve moved the business to sales force now, which sounds like a simple task, but for a very large fragmented business is quite a challenge.
Especially as a software business operating across different currencies, different regions, different price books, it was quite a challenge and we still have not finalised that, but we are nearly at the end of that process now.
I think in general, what we’re seeing is more systems and more devices transitioning from on premise to the cloud or a hybrid model.
With the introduction of AI, it comes with its challenges in terms of more data and more systems. Industries such as building and IoT add a lot of different data points to projects and to customers estates.
And that that raises its own challenges with how you manage all those systems and how you manage all that data in a uniformed way or in a useful way.
But then how do we make use of it, harmonise it and present it in the right way so that it’s got value. Then we can use that intelligence to improve.
Increasing compliance so that procedures and SLAs are met. An improving safety of staff and assets.
The Advancis open platform is designed to seamlessly and easily connect all these additional datasets that we’re seeing from the market and new projects, and then present it in the right way.
There’s a lot of opportunity in the market. As it stands, the demand for security is only increasing and that’s not just physical security.
The cyber element has really increased over the last five to 10 years massively. So that gives us a real aim with WinGuard.
We have laid the foundation for cross-functional convergence for organisations in terms of physical assets, logical and identity.
This forms the base of how we see the future of integration and open integration.
As we grow into a global business, it’s really important to understand the industry and the trends.
Jenny and I attended the event last year in Manchester and we were hugely impressed with the presentations and the panel discussions in terms of the topics, but also the people.
The delegates that were there were of really high quality and knowledgeable within the industry.
So for us, it’s a real opportunity to increase our knowledge and understanding of what’s happening in the market and different people’s views.
It also provides the opportunity to network with those leading industry professionals and share knowledge on the developments that we’re seeing at Advancis and how we see the industry shaping as well.
I think it’s an amazing format and platform which is based around knowledge sharing and experiences rather than a sales trade fair, as we attend quite regularly as well.
Our partnership with Keensight Capital gives us the underpinning foundation to launch
WinGuard X5 but also we have been pushing our new platform, the Advancis Identity Manager and that’s all about the convergence of identity and access security.
As a company, our vision is to build on the foundations that we’ve put in place with, with AOP and with our partnerships globally.
We want to build on that and achieve sustainable growth in new markets, while really supporting our partners and our end users.
To increase security and efficiencies, and in turn make their businesses more operationally efficient.
This article was originally published in the April 2025 Edition of Security Journal UK. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.
